The Cost of Cheap Oil

The world price of oil – Brent Crude – fell below $84 per barrel on October 15.  This was 26% less than the $115 it had reached in June, just four months before.  The rise during the spring had many explanations:  global tensions in Ukraine, the South China Sea and especially the Middle East with […]

Energy Economics

The reason why growth will be more scarce in the future… The central point to this latest video is this: as we’ve shown in previous chapters of the Crash Course, our global economy depends on continual growth to function. And not just any kind of growth; but exponential growth. But in order to grow, it […]

Technology has blindsided oil states

“The price of oil will hit its floor and it will rise again,” President Nicolas Maduro assured Venezuelans, whose shaky economy depends critically on a high oil price. “Venezuela will continue with its social plans. Venezuela will move forward.” No it won’t, and neither will Russia, Iran or Nigeria. The only major oil exporters that […]

What qualifies as true avant-garde? Degrowth qualifies–and very little else

What qualifies as true avant-garde? Degrowth qualifies–and very little else. In the 20th century, avant-garde was a term primarily reserved for the arts: fine arts, music, performance and literature. Avant garde–literally fore-guard or vanguard— challenges the conventions of Status Quo measures of beauty and departs from traditional forms and conceptions of value. In many cases, […]

Limitations to Society, Population, and Technological Growth

I believe that there are limits to everything in terms of our physical world. All of our resources will eventually run out, sources of energy will run dry (or limit our growth) and technology alone will not be able to sustain us forever should our population continue to climb exponentially. Therefore, I believe that at […]

A Pink Slip for the Progress Fairy

If you’ve ever wondered just how powerfully collective thinking grips most members of our species—including, by and large, those who most forcefully insist on the originality of their thinking—I have an experiment to recommend: go out in public and advocate an idea about the future that isn’t part of the conventional wisdom, and see what […]

“Anti-Petrodollar” CEO Of French Energy Giant Total Dies In Freak Plane Crash In Moscow

Three months ago, the CEO of Total, Christophe de Margerie, dared utter the phrase heard around the petrodollar world, “There is no reason to pay for oil in dollars,”  as we noted here. Today, RT reports the dreadful news that he was killed in a business jet crash at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow after the […]

Peak Oil: The Ultimate Challenge for Transition

very interesting lecture from susan krumdieck Professor Krumdieck was asked – “what is the ultimate challenge?”. This presentation was given to the 2014 Leadership NZ workshop in Christchurch (Leadership New Zealand Trust).

Predictions Of ‘Peak Oil’ Production Prove Slippery

The dustiest portion of my home library includes the 1980s books — about how Japan’s economy would dominate the world. And then there are the 1990s books — about how the Y2K computer glitch would end the modern era. Go up one more shelf for the late 2000s books — about oil “peaking.” The authors […]

Daze Of Peak Oil… Or At Least Peak Oil Production

By Chris Hamilton Production of crude oil has nearly stalled despite a near quadrupling in the price since ’01 and it seems likely the world has entered the Peak Oil phase and neither the governments nor central banks (try as they may) can paper this over. Without the growing supply of adequate cheap energy, there […]

Kunstler: Real Life is Not Spin Art

The authorities keep emphasizing that the nurse who caught ebola from Thomas Eric Duncan was sealed in her haz-mat suit the whole time she cared for the poor fellow and blah blah nobody knows how she could possibly catch the darn thing…. But the newspapers and cable news networks are not asking: What about all […]

Peak Oil: Same Nonsense, Different Day

If they don’t get it [doubtful], then they either need to learn some basics, or write about what they know. If they do know but have made a determination that full disclosure of facts to the public would not be in their own best interests, well … draw your own conclusions. The seemingly endless parade […]

Can We Lose the Violent Muslim Cliché?

Most Muslims, like most people everywhere, are peaceable and law-abiding. So why are we continually inundated with images and hate speech perpetuating this harmful lie? There has been a lot of ranting about Muslims in the press, as when Bill Maher recently dissed the entire religion of Islam on television: “It’s the only religion that […]

Heinberg: Paul Krugman and the limits of hubris

Economist Paul Krugman evidently feels irked and irritated by the notion that there might be limits to economic expansion: he has followed up his New York Times op-ed of September 18 (“Errors and Emissions,” to which I replied here) with a new piece titled “Slow Steaming and the Supposed Limits to Growth. It’s interesting to […]

Ebola and the Five Stages of Collapse

At the moment, the Ebola virus is ravaging three countries—Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone—where it is doubling every few weeks, but singular cases and clusters of them are cropping up in dense population centers across the world. An entirely separate Ebola outbreak in the Congo appears to be contained, but illustrates an important point: even […]

Peak Oil Game – Cabrillo College

Peak Oil Game John Welch, Cabrillo College   Concepts and skills taught:   Production inevitably peaks before oil ‘runs out’ Production becomes more difficult as the ‘easy-to-reach’ oil is used up first. Graphing data in Excel.   Materials needed: 1/4 teaspoons, ½ teaspoons, teaspoons, tablespoons, long handled spoons, larger spoons, litter box scoopers, large bag […]

Grieving Could Offer A Pathway Out Of A Destructive Economic System

Is it possible to hold all the grief in the world and not get crushed by it? I ask this question because our failure to deal with the collective and individual pain generated as a result of our destructive economic system is blocking us from reaching out for the solutions that can help us to […]

Dark Age America: The Collapse of Political Complexity

The senility that afflicts ruling elites in their last years, the theme of the previous post in this sequence, is far from the only factor leading the rich and influential members of a failing civilization to their eventual destiny as lamppost decorations or come close equivalent. Another factor, at least as important, is a lethal […]

Kunstler: Must Be the Season of the Witch

As the Governor goblins at the Federal Reserve whistle past the graveyard of dead Quantitative Easing, and the US dollar magically expands like a prickly puffer fish, and Mario Drahgi does what it takes with Euro duct tape to patch all black holes of unpayable debt from Athens to Dublin, and Japan watches its once-wondrous […]

Distraction, surveillance, peak oil and the end of the Internet

Let me be upfront about one thing: I don’t particularly want to be writing a blog, from which this article comes. But as I am an unpublished writer completing his first book in this early twenty-first century of ours, for what should be obvious reasons, I am. Why don’t I particularly want to be writing […]

Yergin gets award named after peak oil realist Schlesinger

Where is George Orwell when you need him? It is a supreme irony that cornucopian oil industry mouthpiece and consultant Daniel Yergin should receive America’s first medal for energy security named after James Schlesinger, the first U.S. energy secretary. For those not familiar with the late Dr. Schlesinger’s views, in a keynote speech he told […]

In the Shadows of the Mosquito Constellation: a dystopian survivalist novel

Scientists, pundits, and self-appointed prophets paint the impact of climate change with brushstrokes of extreme weather, upended economies, and pandemic disease. It’s up to writers and artists to imagine the effects of these changes on human relationships. More and more writers are examining the possibilities and dangers of life in a warming world, including Jennifer […]

Peak Shit! How Oil Spilled the Economy

As I said last time, my exposure to Peak Oil made me realise a few things: – We are approaching the ‘Limits to Growth’ – Growth is dead – Oil will be gone – The world is going to come to a grinding halt. None of this happened, I repeatedly made a fool of myself, […]

John Michael Greer: The Buffalo Wind

I’ve talked more than once in these essays about the challenge of discussing the fall of civilizations when the current example is picking up speed right outside the window.  In a calmer time, it might be possible to treat the theory of catabolic collapse as a pure abstraction, and contemplate the relationship between the maintenance […]

In Search of Oil Realism

Russell Gold’s Wall Street Journal article “Why Peak-Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True” hit the web yesterday. And given Gold’s position as senior energy reporter for the Journal, this is likely the highest profile Peak Oil article of the year. You may also remember Gold from the great video interviews filmed as part of his book […]

The End of Peak Oil

Peak oil has been an alarmist catch phrase for so long that many of us simply assume that oil production has in fact peaked and we’re well on the way to running out of the world’s favorite fossil fuel. Not so, according to this story in the Wall Street Journal: Have we beaten “peak oil”? […]

Peak Oil: The Mirage Pt 3

This is a third look at one of this year’s better features on the subject of peak oil: an article by John Kaufmann entitled: The Energy Independence Illusion. It’s an excellent read [adapted from a presentation to the World Affairs Council of Oregon this past March] for anyone interested in this topic. [Any quotes here […]

Ready Or Not… The Unsustainable Status Quo Is Ending

~ Walking straight in a hall of mirrors I have to confess, it’s getting more and more difficult to find ways of writing about everything going on in the world. Not because there’s a shortage of things to write about — wars, propaganda, fraud, Ebola — but because most of the negative news and major […]

Why Peak-Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True

Have we beaten “peak oil”? For decades, it has been a doomsday scenario looming large in the popular imagination: The world’s oil production tops out and then starts an inexorable decline—sending costs soaring and forcing nations to lay down strict rationing programs and battle for shrinking reserves. U.S. oil production did peak in the 1970s […]

Peak Oil: Are We In The Eye Of The Storm?

U.S. unconventional oil production soared by some 3.3 million barrels a day (b/d) in the last four years, and, if the US Energy Information Administration is correct, is due to climb by another million b/d or so in 2015. While this jump in production was unexpected by most, it was just another phenomenon resulting from […]

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